Close Enough

[proximoception]

She is her father
and her mother,
the house and block and town where she grew up,
six schools, four hospital floors,
countless stadiums, fields, halls, clubs,
restaurants, malls and stores,
three best friends (a dancer, a local politician, a suicide),
X number of boyfriends,
a dog, some birds, no cats,
a blue decade,
a white one,
half of the green and black one I knew best,
a nationality,
two ethnicities,
the ashes of two now indistinguishable Christian denominations,
a four months stab at a stamp collection,
volleyball summers, scrapbooking winters,
a debate team that never quite made it out of town,
two pregnancy scares,
two spinal operations,
unremembered but parent-traumatizing night terrors,
a shattered but reconstructed shin from an earthquake while on a bicycle,
aunts, dentists, a cast of thousands more,
liberal democratic values,
near-crippling fears of snakes and power outages,
an interest in numbers and the order they prove or bring,
an inexplicable love of the film Deep Impact,
a unique inability to remember which cheese is which beyond cheddar, American, swiss,
the many stories her grandmother told while she stayed with her for the final weeks of brain cancer,
three months in Paris,
one hundred thousand cigarettes,
a nearly sexual interest in con artists,
a thoroughly sexual interest in skydiving,
not as much sex as you'd think
though much more masturbation.

I asked her which way East 4th Street was.
She asked what I'd just said.
But I'd just then figured it out from how heavy the traffic was on the road up ahead.
I said to never mind.
She never did.